It's April 1, the day when guys my age finally stop writing 2025 on their checks.

I only wrote two checks this month. One was to my dentist because he still sends me a paper bill with a return envelope, and one was to a company that sells me sausage and cheese at Christmas. Once I pay them both off, I won't write another check until next year. Everything else gets paid online.

And this is how America weakens.

It used to be, you had to work hard to pay a bill. You had to find your checkbook, sit down, write the date, the amount and the name of the company on the check, then you had to sign the check. After that, you had to write at least one address on the envelope, go to a mailbox, and mail the bill.

Yup. Paying your bills used to be every bit as hard as working in a coal mine in 1871.

And that's why my generation is so damn tough.

You see things like this on social media all the time.

"We were the last generation to drink from the garden hose, and ride in the back of a pickup truck, and get smacked senseless by our parents because we did wrong or just because the old man was drunk again. That's why we're tougher than the video game-playing little meadow flowers in this generation," the post reads.

Yeah. We were the last generation to be molested by Father Fondler and not be able to tell anyone because we wouldn't be believed, and the old man would probably smack us for telling lies about the priest.

We were the last generation where our parents became enraged if we dated a nonwhite person, or a Jew, or a Catholic or a Protestant, or a white person, or anyone who wasn't exactly, endlessly, perfectly just like we were. The old man hit you harder for that than he did for lying about the priest. That kind of thing still happens, but it seems to thinning out a little.

They MADE us salute the flag every day. They MADE us love Jesus because Jesus loves force. That crap about peace and love is just for show, something for Father Fondler to talk about from the pulpit even as he rolls an eye at altar boy Timmy, who is about to learn the true meaning of the biblical phrase "suffer the little children."

My dad was an inner-city tenement kid, the child of immigrants. He remembered rickets, diptheria, whooping cough and the other kids at school whacking you around because your folks couldn't speak English. His old man used to hit him with the closed fist, not with the palm of the hand: a punch, not a stinging slap.

Every generation has its brushes with danger. My generation rode in the back of a pickup truck. This generation gets shot to death in third grade, and then the survivors are so weak they need counseling. In my day, teenage boys shuffled down to the draft board and got sent to Vietnam. This generation volunteers and then gets sent to Epstein's War in Iran, where they rain bombs on grade schools so the president can hide a lifelong association with child molesters. We're fighting non-Christians to protect child abusers. Father Fondler would have been proud.

And it's not nostalgic, but I don't miss forced patriotism, or my father's open-palmed slap. I went to Catholic school and no priest ever touched me, but if one had, I don't know if I could have told my parents.

My nostalgia is missing my parents, or my boxer dog Joey, or the way my midsize Massachusetts manufacturing city looked at dusk in 1964.

What did make me tough? It wasn't riding in the back of a pickup truck, and it wasn't drinking from the hose.

It was work, too much work, and worry, and bad bosses, and layoffs and the death of my parents.

And now, it's an America that seems no longer capable of choosing a middle path where it's dusk, and a boy can sit on the porch with his dog and not be scared.

I'm too old to get any tougher, but I can sure as hell get more scared, and I do every day.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www. creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.

Photo credit: Daiga Ellaby at Unsplash